Dominating Regionals, Moot Teams Advance Toward Nationals

December 7th, 2011

With last weekend’s final two regional moot court tournaments in Florida and California complete, Patrick Henry College moves toward January’s national ACMA Moot Court Championships having won all four regionals. Not only did PHC garner top team awards in Virginia, Massachusetts, Florida and California, but the College also earned first-place speaker awards in each of those tournaments, earning first through fourth place in three of the four. Additionally, at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Tournament at Regent University in Virginia, PHC won seven of eight of the top slots, ultimately taking home all four top awards. In that field, as well as at the Western Regional Tournament in California, both final rounds featured PHC teams competing against one another.

In all, PHC again qualified almost double the maximum number of teams allowed, advancing 15 eligible two-person teams that will now have to be pared to eight to compete in the ACMA National Moot Court Tournament at Chapman University Law School in Orange County, Ca., Jan. 13–14. Having contended this fall with schools such as Duke University, the University of North Carolina, the University of Virginia, Holy Cross, the Air Force Academy, and Williams College (listed by US News as the top liberal arts college in recent years), PHC has once again demonstrated a level of dominance in collegiate legal debate that strikes even its competitors as dramatically disproportionate to its size and age.

“I’ve had coaches from many of these universities come up to me afterward and ask me how we do it,” recalls PHC founder and chancellor, Dr. Michael Farris, the College’s founding moot court coach. “For us, success begets success. We’ve been able to recruit very strong candidates to our program because the students who have gone before has seen such success in law school and beyond. These talented young people see a very clear path through our moot court program into the highest levels of the legal profession.”

The College has won five of the past seven ACMA national championships, and two of the top three individual speakers from last year’s team, sophomore Blake Meadows (who set an all-time ACMA score in 2011) and senior Bridget Degnan, are teammates this year. The duo won the Southeast Regional Tournament in Florida last weekend, with Meadows taking home the top speaker award. Other regional tournament championship teams are: Ardee Coolidge and Joshua Chamberlain at the Mid-Atlantic Regional in Virginia; freshmen James Compton and Ben Williamson at the Eastern Regional Tournament in Massachusetts; and Kayla Griesemer and Micah Walters at the Western Regional Tournament in California. Top speaker awards at each of those competitions went to Ardee Coolidge, Kayla Griesemer, Blake Meadows, and Nicole Frazer.

Sophomore Blake Meadows

Sophomore Kayla Griesemer, who won the regional tournament in California with partner Micah Walters, also won the Regent Eastern Regional last year as a freshman with Blake Meadows, then also a freshman. She credits the win to God, saying that the “best part about competing in moot court at PHC is the atmosphere and the attitude that surrounds the competition.

“Of course we all enjoy winning, but all of us wanted to glorify Christ even more than we wanted to win,” she insists.

Coming into the final round against another PHC team, J.C. Cartee and Andrew Ferguson, Griesemer recalls that “all of us took a collective sigh of relief and got to have some fun during the last round.”

Cartee adds that, besides making it all the way to the final round for the first time, his favorite moment of the California tournament was arguing before Superior Court judges.

“The breadth of knowledge required for moot court is amazing,” he says. “You learn legal principles and improve speaking skills, and it forces you to really think quickly because you never know what the judge is going to ask you.”

Meadows, who, according to Dr. Farris “basically scored a string of perfect ballots” as the national individual speaker champion last winter, agrees that “the educational aspect (of moot court) is unparalleled. While a paper or reading gives you some knowledge, having to present something as your own argument imbues a deeper understanding of the issues.”

Moot coach Dr. Frank Guliuzza said he couldn’t have anticipated this year’s regionals results, but credits students’ hard work and dedication for the outcomes.

“We entered four qualifying tournaments last year and won them all, which had never been done before,” he noted. “We assumed that it would be difficult to duplicate that, but we did.”

Added Dr. Farris, recounting the many former PHC moot court competitors who have gone on to top law schools and into elite professional legal appointments: “One-fourth of all of the top 64 teams in the nation are from a little college of 300. It’s safe to say that from a college of 300 we are producing a vastly disproportionate share of the future leaders of the legal profession for the entire nation. We give God the glory for this. It is very encouraging to realize that we really are training the best of the best for the future of this country. Our objective is to train and equip our teams to successfully argue cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, nothing less.”